“You can feel any way you want to about them.” So, let’s take a little trip into the future. “You’ve imagined that end point, but all the details in those intervening years are fuzzy,” Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University who focuses on space exploration, told me. It can be unnerving and melancholy but also thought-provoking. I’ve come to think of this feeling as cosmic introspection. But I don’t know if I’ll live to 71 to see it.Ĭontemplating that feels almost like motion sickness, as if I’m riding an emotional version of Space Mountain, with celestial events playing out overhead. I know for a fact that the next sighting will come in 2061. I was not yet born the last time the comet appeared in the night sky, delighting spectators in 1986. Consider Halley’s Comet, a celestial object that periodically whizzes past Earth on its loop around the sun. The more I think about the space events of the future, the more existentially unmoored I feel-especially when those moments are far away. When I did that math, I experienced a twinge of something between surprise and discomfort. If the universe allows it, I realized, I’ll be 44 when the spacecraft lands on Titan. When NASA announced the Dragonfly mission a few years ago, I imagined my future self, still employed as a space reporter, covering the triumphant landing. The solar system (not to mention the galaxy and the rest of the universe) is big, and getting around it can take years. The mission, if it launches on schedule, will reach Titan in … 2034.Ģ034! That’s the space biz for you. Technicians are already testing some of Dragonfly’s hardware. That was a glimpse of Titan scientists want to bask in the landscape, and soon. No spacecraft has visited Titan since 2005-the farthest landing a robot had ever made from Earth-and that mission was short-lived: The lander sampled the atmosphere on its descent to the surface and ran out of power three hours after touching down. The planetary-science community is extremely eager to get a robot over there and start exploring. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. The wildest part about Titan-the best part, perhaps-is that something could be living there. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary.
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